MOGWAI

To celebrate the release of their live DVD and album on 23rd August, Mogwai will be hosting a very special screening of their live film ‘Burning‘ tonight at 8pm (GMT)

You can view and take part in the screening by going direct to here

This film, Burning, is just one of a thousand Mogwai concert films to have ever been made. No, in fact, tens of thousands. How many people have seen the Scots rock band play live since they formed in Glasgow in 1995? That many, anyway. From sci-fi dystopia to kitchen-sink drama, everyone who experiences this band in concert will make a brand new movie in their head every time.

Mogwai create their own instrumental soundtrack to the imagination, and it’s up to us what we do with it. This isn’t a band who tell us what to think, this is a band who show us how much we can feel.

For directors Vincent Moon and Nathanaël Le Scouarnec (REM: Supernatural Superserious; Take-Away Shows), the three night residency they recorded at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg in early 2009 presented itself as a modern urban noir thriller, a black-and-white journey which starts on the same electrifying New York streets Bernard Hermann scored for Martin Scorsese. Manholes his steam, taxi headlights flare in the camera lens and strangers wait in street corner shadows.

Behind it all, ‘A Precipice’ rises into life, which is as good a place as any to start. A Mogwai gig can often feel like climbing a mountain, or falling off one: whichever feels more likely to remind you that you’re alive.

In grainy black and white, the show unfolds. The band make their way through a rain-washed Manhattan as ‘I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead’ hovers like a commuter’s MP3 soundtrack in the background; louche New York hipsters congregate before the show as the familiar echoes of ‘Hunted By a Freak’ kick in; the beatific, nodding faces of the crowd inside are contrasted with the going-to-sleep streets outside.

Meanwhile, the finest moments of one of the most individual live bands of our time are perfectly captured in grainy close-up: ‘Like Herod’s wall of noise; the dreamy ‘New Paths to Helicon pt 1’; ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ (speaking of Bernard Hermann, there’s a shock worthy of Psycho in this song); the funereal ‘Scotland’s Shame’; strident finale ‘Batcat’.

In the words of Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, “I don’t think we’re a very ‘Greatest Hits’ kind of band, but if we ever did release one, we’ve already decided to call it ‘The Sh*test P*sh’. I think that fact alone means we can never go through with it.” Which means, in other words, that Special Moves is probably the closest we’ll get to a ‘best of’ from them.

Moon and Le Scouarnec call their film an “experience of the senses… a lifetime of feelings in just one night.” You may prefer the quote which opens the band’s debut album Mogwai Young Team and which appears during the film as an intro to Batcat, a recording of a Norwegian fan reading a review of the band: “this music is bigger than words, wider than pictures; if the stars had a sound, they would sound like this.”

Or the words of an excitable young English woman speaking over the closing credits: “it’s like acid, but there’s no comedown.” Yes. It’s exactly like that.

Pic: Tomas Hermoso Edinburgh Corn Exchange October 2008